Be careful with this, as some processes are necessary to the functioning of your computer! This program will list all of the active programs on your computer, and help you identify the ones using the most energy, memory and network resources. Stop resource-hungry programs: You can identify programs that are using a lot of your computer’s resources using Activity Monitor, found in the Utilities folder in Applications.Keeping them empty will keep that storage space open for use. Empty your trash and downloads folders: If you don’t empty your trash and downloads folders regularly, your computer may be storing files that you aren’t using.Shutting down your computer regularly closes these programs and frees up memory. Restart your Mac: The longer your computer runs, the more active programs and stored information it's trying to keep track of.Instead of trying to defrag Mac hard drives, you're better off using some of these methods to speed up the performance of your Apple computer. This makes the defrag process less important to the operational speed of your computer. Your Mac saves data differently, using a process called hot file adaptive clustering to optimize storage space. Most often, when people are asking about defragging a Mac, they want to improve speed. A defrag resaves your files, organizing them to make them easier to access.

This can lead to programs being scattered around the computer, slowing performance. What is disk defragmentation? On a Windows machine, data is stored to the hard drive in open spaces. Confirm that you have a secure backup of all data on the device you will be defragmenting (important to protect against power surges, crashes etc), and press the ‘Defrag’ button.The question of how to defrag a Mac is actually a bit of a misunderstanding, as Macs do not actually have a defrag command. The yellow portion is reserved space required by the Mac operating system and can’t be defragmented.Ĭlick the ‘Start’ button in the lower right. The green portion represents used space that is not fragmented.

The red portion represents fragmented data. Four different colors are displayed to indicate the usage of space: Volume Fragmentation will display a graphical representation for a quick overview for the files laid across the volume to indicate how much fragmentation is across the hard drive. Select the drive from the left of the Drive Genius Window that you’d like to defragment, then select the ‘Defragment’ utility in the Speedup section of the feature window as shown below: To defragment a hard drive, follow these steps: Note: To Defrag your internal startup drive, you are required to boot from a secondary location such as another computer or by creating and using our BootWell utility. This will ensure no data is lost in the event of an unforeseen issue such as power failure etc. Before starting the Defrag utility, be sure to backup your drive and close all open files and applications before proceeding.

How do i defrag a mac